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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Wise Children, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Sex, Procreation, and Parenthood
Twins, Doubles, and Confused Identities
Matriarchy and Found Family
Show Business, Aging, and Memory
Comedy vs. Tragedy
Summary
Analysis
“Good morning,” narrator Dora Chance declares, “and welcome to the wrong side of the tracks.” Dora explains that she and her twin sister Leonora (Nora for short) live on the South side of London, a once-working class area that is rapidly gentrifying. Now, housing prices in the twins’ neighborhood of Brixton are rising, and Dora and Nora can only afford to stay because they live in the house their Grandma left them, at 49 Bard Road. Dora recalls that she was born in this house 75 years ago—75 years to the day, in fact, because today is her and Nora’s birthday.
Right away, by beginning on Dora and Nora’s 75th birthday, the novel focuses on aging, as twins’ progression through time is echoed by their changing Brixton neighborhood. But rather than treating any of this with self-pity, Dora proudly “welcomes” her readers with darkly comic flair, a tone that will become her signature as the narrative progresses.
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Dora was born just five minutes before Nora, and the identical twins have lived together their entire lives (though always in separated bedrooms). These days, their beloved Brixton house is run-down. There are cats everywhere, and the twins no longer have the energy to clean. But Dora is proud of the décor, namely, the signed photographs from famous friends and former colleagues, whom Dora refers to only by their first names: Fred and Ginger, Ivor, Sonnie and Binnie.
The former colleagues Dora references in these photographs are all celebrated entertainers from the 1920s and 1930s. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were dancers; Ivor Novello was a stage and film actor; Sonnie and Binnie Hale, a sibling duo much like Dora and Nora, were British pantomime stars. That Dora and Nora have worked with these people hints at their careers as successful entertainers—a past that perhaps seems incongruous with the twins’ run-down present.
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The sky is a bright blue, which prompts Dora to reflect on a boy she knew once, with bright blue eyes and a completely hairless chest. Dora often believes that if she looks hard enough, she can “see into the past.” In fact, Dora is currently working on a memoir, researching her family’s history as she writes. But before Dora can get too lost in her memories, her reverie is interrupted by a strong gust of wind, which knocks over the twins’ trash can. Dora feels a shiver run through her body, suddenly convinced that something important is going to happen today.
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Dora and Nora have the only Castrato grandfather clock in all of London, a special kind of clock made in the Scottish highland. The Castrato holds sentimental value to the twins: it is the only gift they ever received from their father, Sir Melchior Hazard. Although today, the sisters have just received an invitation for them both to attend their father’s 100th birthday party.
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The invitation has been sent out by Lady Hazard, Melchior’s third wife. His first wife, whom Dora affectionately calls “Wheelchair,” now lives with the twins in their Brixton home. Dora then reveals that though she and Nora are Melchior’s daughters, they were not born to any of his three wives—and Melchior has never officially recognized them as his own. Still, in a bizarre coincidence, the twins share a birthday with their estranged dad.
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Dora reflects that while she and Nora are identical twins, they have never been “symmetrical.” Nora was always freer with money and men, whereas Dora was more cautious. What the Chance sisters always shared was their love of performing (“what a joy it is to dance and sing!”, Dora declares) and their attention to appearances. The twins have always done their hair and makeup in the same way, styling themselves with a 1940s look that reflects their shared heyday. For much of their lives, Dora confesses, the only way people could tell them apart was by their scents: Dora used Mitsouko perfume, whereas Nora used Shalimar.
Nora brainstorms what to wear to the party—certainly not the matching kimonos the twins have on now, gifts from their beloved late uncle Peregrine Hazard (Perry to his nieces). Though age has made the twins look gaunt, Dora is still proud of their sharp cheekbones, a famous Hazard trait inherited from Melchior.
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From across the table, Wheelchair moans in discomfort. Dora explains that Wheelchair was born Lady Atalanta Lynde, an English aristocrat famed for her beauty. She married Melchior when he was still early in his acting career, and the pair was divorced long before Melchior was made a knight for “services to the theater.” Wheelchair has been living in this rundown house for 30 years, though Dora does not explain how this came to be.
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Most days, Dora, Nora and Wheelchair live a simple life together. The twins drink tea or gin while Wheelchair plays Solitaire or reminisces about Melchior, lamenting how he left her for his second wife, a Hollywood star. Every so often, the Chance sisters perform a song at the local pub. Sometimes, Dora and Nora will even perform “uninvited.”
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Dora goes through the mail, noting the electricity bill and the fact that their beloved godchild Tiffany has forgotten to send birthday greetings. Then, the doorbell rings, and in comes Tristram Hazard, one of Melchior’s sons from his third marriage. Tristram is a mess: his bright red hair is wild, and he is crying. Dora notes that Tristram and Tiffany cohost a loud, garish gameshow called “Lashings of Lolly”.
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Now, Tristram reveals the cause of his anxiety: Tiffany has gone missing. To explain himself, Tristram asks Dora and Nora to watch a taping of his most recent show. Dora starts the tape, marveling that Tristram—son of Melchior, and grandson of the Victorian stage actors Ranulph and Estella Hazard—has wound up a gameshow presenter.
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Dora pauses, deciding it is time to give her readers some context on the Hazard family. Both Chance sisters are childless, Dora explains, a fact that Nora is sad about but that brings Dora only relief. Dora also reveals that the woman she calls Grandma is not her biological grandmother, though the twins bear her last name (Chance). The twins’ real grandmother is an actress named Estella, a beautiful woman with red hair and “tremendous legs” who, in her day, played all Shakespeare’s best female roles. One time, she even donned drag as Hamlet, with Cassius Booth (from the infamous American Booth family) as her Horatio.
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Estella was born around 1870, making a name for herself as a child actor before she was eventually cast as Cordelia opposite Ranulph Hazard as King Lear. Ranulph was growing old by the time he met Estella, and the once-great actor was now unpredictable, sometimes slurring his words or forgetting his lines. But as Lear, he was a “marvel”: the play was a hit, and Estella fell in love with her onstage father. Dora notes that coincidentally, Melchior met his third wife in the exact same way, when she played Cordelia to his Lear.
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Once, Dora went to listen to a recording of Ranulph doing a speech from Macbeth. When she heard him speak, she burst into tears, shocked by the harsh power of her grandfather’s voice. But Estella was just as great an actress in her own right. Her Hamlet was such a phenomenon that she brought it over for a touring production in America, where she eventually gave birth to Melchior and his twin brother Peregrine.
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In an aside, Dora explains that although Melchior is the Chance sisters’ father by blood, Perry is the only one who ever claimed them as his daughters. Indeed, everyone in the Hazard family pretends that Dora and Nora are Perry’s children, a fiction that causes Dora great pain. But Dora also suspects that she and Nora are not the only illegitimate children in the family line. After all, despite many marriages and affairs, Ranulph never produced any children until Estella’s Hamlet met Cassius Booth as Horatio.
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Though Ranulph must have suspected that the boys were not his, he showered young Melchior and Peregrine with love. In the boys’ youth, Ranulph (whom Dora as describes as “half mad”) embarked on a world tour, bringing Shakespeare all over the British Empire. As the family chased Ranulph from place to place, Estella entertained her boys. She also had an affair with some new man in every new destination.
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Perry always talks about his childhood on the road with great fondness. Like his mother Estella, Perry had bright red hair and loved “change,” “fornication,” and “trouble.” He was also an amateur magician, capable of impressive conjuring tricks. But Dora laments that now Perry has made himself disappear, vanishing into a remote jungle in his quest to find exotic butterflies.
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Dora returns to her grandparents’ tale. Ranulph’s world tour continued to Texas and Arizona, but money had started to run low. One day, Ranulph gambled away the crown he used for Lear, so Estella made him a new one out of cardboard and gold paint. By the time Cassius Booth wrote to the Hazards, offering to produce a play for them on Broadway, Ranulph was desperate. They settled on Othello, with Ranulph playing Othello, Cassius as Iago, and Estella as Desdemona.
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During the opening night party, Estella and Cassius slipped away to have sex. By that point, Dora explains, Ranulph was old enough and troubled enough that he could no longer tell the difference between life and theater. At any rate, in a jealous rage, he killed first Estella and Cassius and then himself, leaving Peregrine and Melchior orphaned and stranded in New York City. Ruefully, Dora notes that Estella had always had a gift for “tragic exits.”
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Despite being twins, the boys were opposites and often in conflict. Melchior was dark and brooding and serious about art, all traits that make Dora think he was more likely Cassius’s son than Ranulph’s. Perry, by contrast, was all about fun, his personality as bright as the flaming red hair he inherited from Estella.
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After a few months, Ranulph’s miserly sister arrived in America, hoping to take Melchior and Perry back home with her to England. Perry slipped away before they could get on the boat, building a prosperous life for himself in America—though how he did it, Dora is still not sure. Melchior, on the other hand, was trapped with his aunt, with nothing left of his parents but the cardboard crown Estella had made for Ranulph.
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Melchior’s aunt tried to keep her nephew from the theater, but to no avail: Melchior worshipped his father, reciting all Ranulph’s great speeches alone in his room. So, soon enough, Melchior left his aunt and headed to London, the cardboard crown in his arms. There, he found lodging at a boarding house on 49 Bard Road, a favorite spot for vaudeville performers. Dora notes that at that time, before “the lights went out all over Europe,” their Brixton neighborhood was a major entertainment hub.
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Melchior slept in the attic of the boarding house, in the cheapest room. It was in this house that he met Dora and Nora’s mother, an orphaned girl who worked as a maid. Dora does not know if Melchior and her mother, known as “Kitty,” had a prolonged affair, or if it was merely a one-time fling. She also does not know whether their relationship was consensual, a thought that hurts her deeply. What Dora does know is that Kitty died in childbirth. By time she passed away, Melchior, having started to make a name for himself in the London theater scene, was long gone.
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Grandma Chance then adopted Nora and Dora and gave them her surname. But even though Grandma Chance was always kind, her past remains a mystery to Dora. To Dora’s knowledge, Grandma never married. She was a nudist and a vegetarian. Now, Dora reflects, she and Nora grow more like Grandma every day, a triumph of “nurture over nature.”
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Dora and Nora were born during the start of World War I. Grandma explained war by saying that once every generation, the old men got too jealous of the young men, so they figured out how to kill them off. For her part, Grandma never seemed to care much for men at all. In fact, it wasn’t until she took the newborn Nora and Dora in her arms that she felt she understood the purpose of marriage or sex.
As Nora and Dora’s babyhood took over the house, most of Grandma’s boarders moved out. Then, when the two Chance girls were toddlers, Melchior’s unpleasant old aunt died, and she mailed the clock to Grandma’s boarding house, since that was Melchior’s last known address. Around the same time, the war ended, and Melchior found his way back to London stages. So, Grandma, eager to confront Melchior, bought a ticket to see him in Romeo and Juliet. But when Grandma tracked Melchior down after the show, he flatly denied ever fathering the girls.
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A few years passed without any contact with the Hazard family, until the day Perry showed up, unannounced, at 49 Bard Road. Nora and Dora, still young children, greeted Perry stark naked, baffled by this handsome stranger who had just barged into their home. He endeared himself to Grandma with a slice of cake, and to the twins with a magic trick, conjuring a white dove out of thin air.
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Perry then told Grandma why he had come: Melchior was about to get married, and he wanted to bribe Grandma to keep quiet about the bastard Chance twins. Grandma reluctantly agreed to the payday, though she was skeptical the money would come (her motto has always been “hope for the best, expect the worst”). And indeed, it was not Melchior but Perry who started sending money, the checks arriving of every month. To explain things to his accountant, Perry listed himself as the girls’ father and Grandma as their mother.
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Nora and Dora did not care about any of this. All that mattered to them was the presents Perry bought, including a new record player and money for dancing lessons. Eventually, when Perry got restless (as he always did), he took off to travel the world, leaving Grandma with a case of crème de menthe and each of the girls with a new pair of tap shoes. Every Christmas, he sent the twins a present from some faraway place.
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A few years later, a new kind of present arrived: a 14-year-old girl named Cynthia, who showed up on Grandma’s doorstep looking for work at Perry’s recommendation. Sure enough, Grandma hired Cynthia (now known to Dora as “Our Cyn”) as a nanny for the twins. A few years later, Cyn married a cabby and gave birth to a daughter, Mavis, who then had a daughter of her own named Brenda. Brenda then gave birth to Tiffany, and though Tiffany’s father ran off, Brenda quickly remarried a boxer named Leroy. All these women called Grandma “Grandma,” and all of them treated the Chance house as if it were their own.
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Even as a baby, Dora reflects, Tiffany was beautiful. She was one of the first pupils in the little school Dora and Nora ran out of their house, the Brixton Academy for Dance. Eventually, Tiffany stopped coming to dance classes, but she still always visited Nora and Dora, even as her makeup got bolder, her outfits more risqué. It was on these visits that Tiffany first saw Tristram and immediately fell head over heels for him.
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Tristram also has a twin brother, Gareth, who became a Jesuit missionary and left London years ago. The boys were mostly raised by the family’s Old Nanny, the same Old Nanny who once raised Wheelchair. Dora disdains the boys’ mother, Melchior’s third wife, whom he met when he played Lear to her Cordelia. The third wife was just 21 years old at the time, and best friends with Saskia, Melchior’s daughter with Wheelchair, from drama school. When Saskia found out about the affair, the two friends never spoke again.
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As Melchior grew older and less reliable onstage, his third wife turned to television to maintain the family’s ritzy lifestyle. Melchior did ads for tobacco and port, while his third wife endorsed toilet paper and butter substitutes (which is why Dora and Nora only ever refer to her as My Lady Margarine). And Melchior’s other children found their way to television, too. Saskia started a cooking show, while her twin sister Imogen hosts a children’s program about goldfish. In fact, television is the only place Dora sees the Hazards, though Tristram drops by occasionally to see the women Saskia has (falsely) told him are his “aunts.”
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Dora returns to the day Tiffany and Tristram first met, recalling the instant attraction between the two young people. Within a week, Tiffany had shacked up with Tristram, much to the dismay of her parents Brenda and Leroy. Shortly after, she joined him on TV as the host of “Lashings of Lolly.” Tiffany insisted she loved Tristram, but Dora and Nora worried about her—she looked tired and pale, and she had started making a suspicious number of trips to the bathroom.
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Back in the present, Tristram plays the VCR tape of “Lashings of Lolly.” The show begins, but in the spot where Tristram would normally introduce Tiffany, she is nowhere to be found. Onscreen, Tristam is visibly shaken, but he continues, announcing tonight’s guest: his father, Melchior. My Lady Margarine helps Melchior to the microphone.
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The game show, which involves a big wheel, bright lights, and fake palm trees, begins. But Tiffany—whose job it is to spin the wheel—still hasn’t appeared, and Tristram panics. Then a hush falls over the studio audience, and Tiffany arrives, dressed only in underwear and stilettos and an oversized sports jersey with a giant “69” on the front, a gag gift from Tristram one Christmas. She is singing a wordless song, and her eyes are hazy. There are wildflowers in her hair.
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Tiffany starts down the stairs of the game show set. Something about the way she wobbles on her heels, coupled with the memory of all those trips to the bathroom, makes Dora realize that Tiffany is pregnant. Dora asks Tristram to confirm this, and he admits that it is true, crying that he is not ready to be a father. Dora and Nora are livid, but before they can properly chastise Tristram, they must finish watching the show.
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On the screen, Tiffany starts singing a nursery rhyme. The camera keeps rolling, much to Dora’s horror, even when Tiffany takes off her sports jersey to reveal her bare breasts on TV. Tristram stands helplessly by, so it is Melchior who steps in, taking the mink stole off My Lady Margarine’s shoulders and placing it onto Tiffany to cover her up. Dora finds herself strangely touched by the gesture.
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Next, Tiffany prepares to do her usual signoff, wishing a good night to everybody in the audience. But before she can finish her speech, her face crumples and she runs off, leaving Tristram and his parents stunned. It is all Tristram can do to close out the program, encouraging the audience to come back to “Lashings of Lolly” the following week. As the studio audience claps, Nora stands and turns the TV off.
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Tristram explains why he has come to the twins’ house: Tiffany has gone missing. Tristram spent all yesterday searching for her, before crashing at Saskia’s house. Dora must now reveal the “most unmentionable” secret in the Hazard family lore: even though Saskia is Tristram’s half-sister, and the same age as his mother, the two have been having an affair since Tristram was a teenager. Dora thought that Tristram’s feelings for Tiffany had put an end to his tryst with Saskia, but Nora spots a strand of Saskia’s red hair on Tristram’s clothes—clearly, the relationship persists.
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At that very moment, Brenda rushes into the house, having been informed of Tiffany’s disappearance by the police. While Brenda shouts at Tristram, Dora and Nora hide out in the kitchen and make tea. With a start, Dora realizes she is already thinking of Tiffany in the past tense. The phone rings, and Wheelchair answers it. She listens for a moment, then delivers the bad news: a faceless body has been found, and the police suspect that it is Tiffany’s. Brenda lets out a high-pitched scream, the kind Dora has not heard since the war.
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Brenda leaves, then Tristram. Left alone, Dora and Nora put rum in their tea. The wind is still going strong, and Dora thinks back to the morning, when she’d hoped that the wind signaled something exciting. Dora wonders if Melchior will cancel the party, but Nora is firm that he will not, and that the twins should still attend: “life must go on.”
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